FRANCE: Of 11 French companies, businessmen and politicians alleged by the Iraqi magazine Al-Mada (The Horizon) to have received millions of barrels of oil from Saddam Hussein, the Gaullist politician and MEP Mr Charles Pasqua is by far the best known.
Mr Pasqua twice served as France's interior minister, the first time when Mr Jacques Chirac was prime minister, from 1986 until 1988. He is president of the Union for Europe of the Nations (UEN) group in the European Parliament, to which six Fianna Fáil MEPs belong.
"I am not, and I have never been, a friend of Saddam Hussein," Mr Pasqua told Le Monde newspaper. His RPF party approved of the 1991 Gulf War, he noted. The list from the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation (SOMO) published by Al-Mada, and reported in yesterday's Irish Times, said Mr Pasqua was allocated 12 million barrels of oil.
It was, however, "entirely possible that other people, especially politicians, may have received funds from the Baathist regime," Mr Pasqua added. "But don't look in my direction." The list published by Al-Mada contains 270 names and covers 1999 only.
But the system under which "friends" of the regime received barrels of oil from contracts signed under the UN's Oil for Food programme reportedly continued until the second half of 2002. Recipients of Saddam's largesse relied on middlemen to resell their oil for them.
Other French politicians known to have maintained friendly relations with Saddam's regime do not figure on the list. They include the extreme right-wing leader of the National Front, Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen, Mr Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who resigned as defence minister in protest at France's participation in the 1991 war, and Ms Roselyne Bachelot, the current minister of the environment.
The French foreign ministry yesterday washed its hands of the alleged payments, saying they involved purely private transactions. But a businessman knowledgeable in Iraqi affairs told Le Figaro that "Paris knew." One of the men on the list, Mr Bernard Merimée, is a former ambassador to Rome and the United Nations.
Like Mr Pasqua, Mr Patrick Maugein, the head of the Soco International oil company, denied Al-Mada's report that he received 25 million barrels of Iraq crude, calling it "ridiculous". Le Monde says Mr Maugein is "reputedly close to Jacques Chirac". Mr Maugein acknowledged he was part-owner of an Italian refinery that purchased Iraqi oil legally, and that he often saw the deputy prime minister Mr Tariq Aziz when the latter came to Paris.
One of the Frenchmen on the list, Mr Gilles Munier, the secretary-general of Franco-Iraqi Friendship and the man who translated Saddam's novels into French, admitted that his group received Iraqi oil money as commissions on sales it helped to broker.
"It was all done in the framework of the oil-for-food programme and there was nothing illegal about it," he said.